Or anyplace else for that matter. I'm not a modeller. For me Poser is an animation tool (toy?) but I'm surprised that more modellers haven't created more P5 dynamic hair models. In fact, when Poser 5 came out I was looking forward to artists who had done hair in the past to release all-new P5 versions of their past work.

P5 hair is very wire like and also very much a system hog and slows down render time. I believe what happened is everyone discovered that and still prefers transmapped hair. Just a thought, I can only speak for myself

Also, they are not much use to those of us who render in Bryce and/or Vue.

No, I agree with you, dirk. On a P4 2.54GHz w/1GB memory, in order to get a "full" head of hair, slows down the render so much as to be untenable - what you need for it to be useful is an 3.06GHz MP (4 cpus) Xeon system with 2GB memory: that might help. For Poser anyway, transmapped hair has too many advantages still - full, transparency for feathering/edges, manageable, low render impact. BYS

Or anything else for that matter, martindj. Hair doesn't export usefully to 3DSMax, LightWave, Cinema4D; nothing. BYS

And, all the tools to build your own dynamic hair are included with P5. So anyone with the patience could make their own custom hair.

It's also a smaller market. Dynamic hair only works in P5, whereas transmapped hair works in both P4 and P5. And the majority of Poser users are still using P4. BeatYourSoul: According to Reiss Studio, the BodyStudio plugin for Max will soon be updated with support for P5's dynamic hair.

Very few P5 only things sell at all, from what I've seen.

There's a ton of them over at Rdna-- they render well, they render fast, they look pretty darn good. I use them in my gallery a lot. They have enough to put out a cd of them. BIggest open secret in poserdom as far as I'm concerned, Colm's and Syd's P5 hair rocks. They even give a few away free so you can try them out. Emily

I can certainly make some...I was just busy elsewhere! LOL

Partly the P4/transmapped lowest-common denominator is the reason, as mentioned above (why make something Poser-5 only when most punters are still using Poser 4?) and partly the overhead of Poser 5 hair - it's only worth usign dynamic hair (IMHO) where it offers distinct advantages over transmapped hair. I can't, for example, see me ever trying to reproduce my "fluffy chick" version of the DAZ Hatchling Phoenix with transmapped hair. On the other hand, many human head hair situations can be covered either by transmappd hair or - something I'm surprised to have noticed no examples of - transmapped Poser 5 "dynamic cloth" (which ought to offer, in theory, something of a halfway house between transmapped P4 hair and strand-based P5 hair). I keep meaning to try some transmapped cloth hair and never get around to it :( Cheers, Cliff Bowman

I used it for mane and tail on a horse, needs to be explored more, it has possible uses. This in reply to who3d. something I'm surprised to have noticed no examples of - transmapped Poser 5 "dynamic cloth" (which ought to offer, in theory, something of a halfway house between transmapped P4 hair and strand-based P5 hair). I keep meaning to try some transmapped cloth hair and never get around to it :( Cheers, Cliff Bowman

Niles: Kewl - I missed that (not that I'm even close to omni-present). But IMHO we ought to be seeing more results of people experimenting with the idea - unless everyone is at that same stage as me (yeah, done a bit of that and can see it's potential, but haven't had the time to actually finalise a hairpiece to show off). For example, I've draped a cloth over someone's head in a few different ways and gone "My! that's actually pretty good" but not painted any hair onto it or tidied the edges :( Cheers, Cliff Bowman

I tried clothifying my Tiffany hair, but it didn't turn out well. The hair wouldn't hold its shape.

Although my experience is lacking, I believe you can set not only cloth "firmness" (tendency to change shape) but also set different sections of cloth to have different strengths - so (for example) the main body of hair might be set not to stretch or sheer much, with the ends set to be much more flexible. There's also a good chance that many wigs not specifically designed for cloth use would be "problematical", having "faults" like intersecting with the head/neck/shoulders/the wig itself. Such design issues would not adversely affect "normal use" anything liek as much as it'd affect the ability of the wig to work like "cloth" in the P5 cloth room. Just thoughts (I don't know the Tiffany hair offhand, and I certianly don't KNOW most hair peices to the extent required to clothify them). Cheers, Cliff Bowman

Those were my conclusions as well, who3d. I'd probably do better building a new "cloth" wig from scratch and working out the kinks, layer by layer, instead of trying to adapt an existing piece.

Yup. Try a square mesh, say 20 * 20 squares or more, hanging over a model's head and watch it drop and "conform" to the head shape. mesmerising :)